Professional Women’s Hockey League | Montreal team becomes the Montreal Victory

The LPHF teams now have names, logos, identities – at least, their fans will say. The Montreal team becomes the Montreal Victory.

The Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) unveiled the long-awaited names and logos of its six teams on Monday morning. In addition to the Montreal Victory, there are the Boston Fleet, the Minnesota Frost, the Ottawa Charge, the Toronto Sceptres and the New York Sirens. The mandate to develop the identity of each team was entrusted to the New York agency Flower Shop.

The name of the Montreal team, the League indicates, refers to “the competitive spirit that reigns in Montreal.” “It acts as a source of inspiration towards reaching the highest sporting heights.”

“It was incredibly important to us that the name resonated in French and, quite frankly, that it be French above all. That was one of the criteria,” explains The Press LPHF Vice President, Brand and Marketing Kanan Bhatt-Shah, who led the creative process. “It’s a request we’ve heard from fans.”

The logo forms a “V” – for Victory, obviously. Within the “V” are red wings that “subtly allude to the goddess of Victory and symbolize strength and agility.” In the center of the wings, we can see a navy blue “M” – for Montreal. The fleur-de-lis, highlighted in the center of the logo, “evokes the rich cultural history of the province and the city.”

Since each team retains the primary colours of the inaugural season – a way of maintaining a “continuity effect” – the Victory logo mainly adopts burgundy and cream. “For Montreal specifically, we heard loud and clear how much these colours were appreciated,” says M^me Bhatt-Shah.

According to Marie-Christine Boucher, vice-president of sales and marketing for the Victoire, the new name “reflects a lot of Montreal’s sporting heritage in all sports, not only the Canadiens, but in football and elsewhere.”

The victory, she believes, fits perfectly with the organization’s “top to bottom” mindset. “Our season unfortunately ended abruptly in May. One of the first things Marie-Philip [Poulin] told me: we’re going back to work tomorrow, we’re starting again and we’re going to win.”

“The way you look at it is: whether you win or lose, it’s the state of mind you’re in.”

The creative process

The league oversaw the entire process, including entrusting the development of the six teams’ identities to the New York agency Flower Shop. The clubs were consulted, it is assured, but their exact level of involvement is not clear.

According to LPHF Senior Vice President, Business and Operations Amy Scheer, a “group of people [de Montréal] was involved in the process” for Montreal’s identity, especially in the initial “discovery” phase. “We started by getting feedback from our general managers, our players and our fans. We wanted to make sure that we would be able to understand what the logo and the name represented to everyone.”

Criteria were put in place. Each name was subject to different questions: “Does it capture the soul of the city, the soul of the market, the soul of the community?”, “Does it feel like it will create an emotional connection with the fans in that market?”, “What are the opportunities for our fans, our players and our communities to be able to [lui donner une signification, lui donner vie] ? », “Will it stand the test of time?”…

The League also sought to choose names that “inspire endless possibilities in visual identity and creative potential to last a lifetime,” Bhatt-Shah notes.

The final decisions were made by a committee of the League, with the support of the members of the board of directors.

“There was a democratic notion in the internal process,” says Amy Scheer. “And every team name that came in and went [les droits de la propriété intellectuelle] was presented to this group of people and examined.”

In Montreal and other markets, the role of the teams “is to develop the communication plan and implement it, to present it” to fans, Marie-Christine Boucher explains. She will announce, starting Monday, “special activations” and community events to “bring this new identity to life.”

Each team’s new jerseys will be released closer to the start of the season, which has yet to be announced. That will likely be “late October or early November,” Bhatt-Shah said.

Traditional lead times for new sports uniforms are about a year. In this case, the Bauer company, with which the LPHF did business, “was willing to compress that lead time.” So everything is ready now.

All that remains is to wait for the start of the season.